The Death of the Night-Time Economy: Why Ireland is Closing Down After Midnight

0:00The podcast is all about the nighttime economy, the strangling of the nighttime economy in Ireland. We claim to be partiers, gossipers, spoofers, storytellers, drinkers, late night people, people who love music, crack. And yet there's hardly a place to go after midnight in this country of ours. Why? What can be done about it? And why it is an urgent, not just economic and financial and commercial imperative, but a sociological imperative. So bring back the nighttime economy that's all coming up in a couple of minutes.

0:57tin hats. You shouldn't have to be your own IT department as well. That's why I rely on AT &T Business. They keep your connectivity reliable so you have one less thing to worry about. Powered by AT &T Business. Built to work. Get AT &T Business at business.att.com. Think of a toilet as just an everyday object? Your entire perspective shifts the moment you experience a Kohler smart toilet. Design changes everything, transforming a basic routine into something extraordinary. With standout aesthetics and intuitive controls, these are functional works of art. Stunning design that never sacrifices performance.

1:36Enjoy customizable features for elevated comfort and convenience. It's more than a fixture. It's a cleaner routine and a more refined space. Experience the difference of Kohler smart toilets. Find more at Kohler.com. To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by Acast. And how are you doing there? John and I are having a little chuckle chuckle about his upcoming Hollier. And it's all today about Holliers. Holidays, experiences. The vast majority of us now, it's mid-September. We went away in the summer, went somewhere, maybe stayed at home. But we went off, and particularly those of us who have been abroad.

2:27One thing, and this is going to be an Irish-specific podcast, but it's also going to be applicable, I know, to the UK and to certain other parts of the world, but particularly Ireland and the UK. And it's all about the complete death of the nighttime economy. the fact that there are no places to go after midnight in Ireland, there are no places to go after midnight in the UK. We have an extraordinary situation where in Ireland we pride ourselves on being partiers, being talkers, musicians, late-night people, drinkers, carousers, and yet anyone who has spent any time this summer in Spain, Portugal, wherever you happen to have been, in Eastern Europe, wherever it was, right?

3:14What you know is the nightlife in these countries is far, far superior to the nightlife in our country, number one. And number two, the nighttime economy, which is a greater idea, which is, does the economy live? It doesn't have to be 24-7. It doesn't have to be the city that never sleeps, New York, New York. It is, is there an opportunity for those of us who work weird hours, and I'm sure many of you listening don't have nine to five jobs. You don't have a daily commute. You might be doing all sorts of things. You might be working for yourselves. You could be working in hospitality. You could be working in shift work, all these sort of things.

3:54You could be up all night trying to write, up all night trying to make music, up all night trying to be creative. You are basically not necessarily served by the nine to five commuter economy. And the question is, where have you got to go? Anywhere. Anybody who has been abroad will feel this. So this podcast is going to be a typical September podcast, which is looking back on the summer experience and asking the question. And griping. And griping, griping. In Ireland, whatever happened to the nighttime economy, which when John and I were youngful as an indulgent in the nighttime economy was far, far superior.

4:40I talk to my own children. They talk about Dublin. They say, Dad, there's about four places in the city to go. And that's it. And one of them, and I'm not going to be trying to be down with the kids, but I do know the name of it, Izakaya was closed down the other week. And that was one of the few places that my own children went to. And I have been in Galway during the week,

5:02David McWilliams: talking about the nighttime economy. Galway had 27 nightclubs in the 1990s. It now has one, only one, in the city of Galway, which is a city full of students, full of young people, and yet it has nothing. I'll just give you a statistic, okay? We had many a good night in Galway back in the day. Yeah, Galway's dead at night. It's completely dead. So let's look at the population dynamics. Half of Ireland's population is below the age of 40, right? 20 % of Ireland's population are between 15 and 29. So what you have is a huge cohort of the population is under 40. In fact, when I wrote that book, John the Pope's Children, it was about the kids who were born in 1979, who would be just about, let's say, 45 now, 46 now, those kids.

5:56But it was around that era, it was all through the 80s and into the early 90s that basically the population here, the birth rate was growing. they are now the upper end of the cohort we're talking about. But we're talking about half the people in the country are under 40 years old, right? And every single year, what you hear is pubs closing, nightclubs closing, nowhere to get a drink after 12 o 'clock, no transport infrastructure to take you home after 12 o 'clock. and of course that's before we talk about the price of everything and the way in which excise duty has been put on booze and this of course makes booze very expensive.

6:42It reduces people's sense of going to the pub and of course if you price the pub out, you price out something very deep in Irish heritage because the pub isn't just a place, John, as you know, to go and have a drink. It's a social place. I am the grandson of a West Cork publican. I know that my granny's pub effectively was a confessional. It was a place that people went to gossip. It was a place that people went to escape. It was a place that people went to meet their mates. People did little deals, the farmers down the back of it. It was a vibrant part of the social ecosystem of the country. And it was jammers all the time, right?

7:27And that is, of course, my memory of the 1980s, the early 1980s, the late 1970s. But my sense is that the pub in Ireland has a special place in our imagination, right? So much so that maybe the greatest cultural export in Ireland is not James Joyce, but is the Irish pub. There are thousands of Irish pubs all over the world. In fact, John, I'll give you an example. Many years ago, in the 1990s, I was in Kiev, which was known as Kiev then, and I was trying to figure out how could I come up with a risk indicator for the various different post-socialist, post-Soviet economies, because they were very risky at the time.

8:14There was a lot of corruption, a lot of moving coming in and out, mafioses, yada, yada, yada. And I remember walking into, and being quite freaked out because I couldn't come up with a good idea. And I walked into an Irish bar called O 'Brien's, which is actually still there because I was there a couple of years ago in Keefe. And I sat at the bar. Is that one of those bars that they, you know, the hook, line and sinker, they just load the old signs, the old this, that and all that into a truck and off it went, built it up. Exactly. So this is like 1996. It's a long time ago. Yeah, it was a pop-up Irish pub.

8:51So it was kind of Victoriana. It was like a Dublin Victorian pub, which you would imagine. So if you took, for example, let's say, Doheny and Nesbitts, or if you took the front of toners, or if you took the Palace Bar and you actually just put it together, right? Complete with nicotine stains on the ceiling. All that, complete the nicotine stains on the ceiling, Flann O 'Brien in the back, arguing with people, you know, all that sort of stuff. So I went in there and I remember the barman, and I always remember him was from a place called Manor Hamilton, which is in County Leitrim. He looked at me and he said to me, and I was a young fella, but of course I looked like a paddy and sounded like a paddy.

9:35And he said, God, you look very upset, young fella. What's the story? Were you crying? No, I was just kind of, I had about 12 hours to figure out something, to go back to France, to the head office, to explain why our team had made these bets in various different countries and what the risk profile was. And this was before the IMF were in there, before the World Bank, before all the rating agencies, et cetera. So you're saving your own ass, really. A yardstick. John, I have spent, as you know, my entire career saving my own arse, right? That is actually, and on many occasions, not being able to save my own arse and getting kicked out the door.

10:16But I was talking to your man and I said, you know, I've got to come up with this thing. He said, you're an economist. Jeez, that's an unusual job. And we chat, chat, chat, chat, chat. And I was saying, you know, I have to come up with this idea, this indicator of risk. And he said, well, I'll give you an idea. I said, what? He said, why don't you count the number of Irish pubs in these emerging cities? And I said, what? He said, look, he said, we've set up an Irish pub here. He said, I also set up one in Prague a year or two ago. and he said, when you see an Irish pub being set up in a far-flung city miles away from Ireland, miles away from the source of finance, miles away from the source of the Guinness, for example, what you know is that the risk in that city is beginning to fall.

11:02I said, how do you mean? He said, because what we do is when we set up a pub, we need to know the tax man, we need to know the corruption, we need to know who to pay, We need to know how to get our beer into this country, how to get our money out of this country. We need to know what the areas are. We need to know is there an up-and-coming middle class because the Guinness is expensive, right, for the local people. He had his finger on the pulse, didn't he? Yeah, and we need to know is there an expat community so that if we put on English Premier Football or Irish Rugby, we'll fill the place out.

11:33And I was looking at this geezer and he was saying, so what you've got to do is you've got to figure out and find how many pubs are in Moscow, Kiev, Warsaw, Budapest, you know, Zagreb, Belgrade, all these cities. Yeah, yeah. And he said, if there's lots of Irish pubs there per head of population, well, then you know that these countries are turning around and they're becoming less risky. If there's no Irish pubs there, it means there's no vibe, there's no emerging middle class, there's no international investors, it's still too corrupt, you can't get your money out, Yadda, yadda, yadda. And I said, that's an extraordinary Fakki index.

12:15So I rang up Guinness. Guinness. The next day I got the team in Paris to ring up Guinness. And I asked them how many pubs. And we set up the Irish pub index. And we divided the amount of pubs by the population of each major city. And lo and behold, an extraordinary thing emerged, John, was that the index was more accurate at predicting interest rates and capital flight in that country than any subsequent IMF report, which is an amazing piece. That's incredible. Inventive economics is economics made up on the hoof in a bar after a couple of scoops, but economics that makes common sense. Now, the reason I tell you this in this discussion about the nighttime economy is, back then, what Ireland exported were pubs.

13:08Was it a vibe? Was it a crack? Was it a sense of social? Kind of a safe space as well. You know, like, it's a safe place. It'll be friendly. This is our national brand, right? Lots of people might not like that, and they might think, you know, our national brand through alcohol is wrong. And I get that. But this is our national brand. And yet, what you see here at home is pubs are closing all the time, nightclubs are closing all the time, excise duty is slammed on alcohol, VAT is slammed on alcohol, the licensing laws are slammed, and as a result of this, what you are finding is that bars, clubs, nightclubs are closing, number one.

13:54And number two, there is very, very little other outlets to replace them. So what are you kind of talking about here, Mike? Like how many pubs and clubs have closed in the last while? I'm giving a shocking statistic, John.

14:11David McWilliams: 2 ,205 Irish pubs have closed between 2005 and 2025. That is one in four bars in the country. one or four bars. The number of public licenses fell from 8 ,500 to 6 ,500. And that's because you need various different licenses for various different bars to stay open. 86 pubs closed last year alone and 117 pubs closed 2023. Oh, that's depressing. So that means that on average, The closure rate is 100 to 140 pubs a year for the last 20 years. And this has accelerated between 2019 and 2024. And the forecast is that another 600 to 1 ,000 pubs will close over the next decade if there is no government intervention.

15:12And I'll just tell you the regional differences in the country are really stark.

15:15David McWilliams: Closure rate per county in Limerick is 37 % over 20 years. That's 30 % of all bars in Limerick have gone. 34 % of all bars in Offaly are gone. 33 % of all bars in Cork are gone. 32 % in Roscommon, 32 % in Tipperary. Wow. In Dublin, it's only 1%. So what we're looking at is a massive fall off in rural pubs or in pubs in small towns, on bars, let's say, in what used to be called, you know, regional capitals, like small towns around the country. Now, of course, then, if there's no bar, if you're living in a small village, the idea that you'd stay in that town if there's no bar, there's nowhere to go, you leave.

16:04Of course, you prefer to go to Dublin, Galway, London, Australia, wherever. Because you're a kid, you're in search of money and fun and all that sort of thing. It could also be the other way around. Their pubs are closing because the kids are leaving. It's chicken and egg, John. Yeah, yeah. So because the young people are leaving, the pubs are closing. But because the pubs are closing, the young people are also leaving. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So that's the scene, John. But why is this happening? You know, I mean, I know you just said a chicken and egg. But I mean, in general, there seems to be a massive shift.

16:36Like there's so many factors involved here. Like the price of beer with excise duties and all the rest? Is it a change of culture amongst the younger generation that they just don't go to pubs, maybe because of the price? Or are they more health conscious? Or what is it? What's going on? So what we know in economics is that if you increase the price, the demand will fall. That is one of the basic rules of economics. Yeah, the price elasticity. Over the last 20 years, the price of alcohol has gone through the roof. We have the fifth highest alcohol drink prices in Europe. Wow. But that's only in supermarkets, off licenses, etc.

17:17David McWilliams: When it comes to actually going out, the average price of a pint of stout in our country is between 6 and 6 euros 20. That is 18 % up from November 2022. Now that is extraordinary. Lots of dubs listening to say they haven't had a pint at€6 for many, many years. That's because the average price in the centre of Dublin goes from€7.5 to€11, which is crazy. Ah, yeah. I mean, you're getting into Scandi territory there. Exactly. But in general, local bars around the suburbs, it's between€5 and€6 for bars outside. And the cheapest place is Westmead. If you want to go drinking, the price of a pint is about€2 less than Dublin.

18:01But, but, yeah, but again, these contrast wildly. So you're talking, you know, in Dublin between 7 and 11 or between 5 and 6, no matter where you are, right? In Germany, the price is about 4 euros a pint.

18:17David McWilliams: Yeah. Spain, the price is about 3 euros a pint. In Portugal, it's only about 2 and a half euros a pint. And people have come back from Portugal and they're saying exactly that, right? Shockingly for a country that is so associated with Guinness, the price of a pint in London, One of the most expensive cities in the world is 3 % less than a price in Dublin. It's incredible. I'll tell you something, Mac, actually. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who's just back from Japan, and I was asking him, what was he doing at night and stuff? And they were saying, we went to the bars, it was fantastic.

18:49And it was really cheap. It was about three quid a pint in Tokyo, which I find, because I was there, I don't know, 20, 30 years ago, and it was really expensive. Well, you know what's happened in Japan. You know, we've done many's, the podcast,

19:06David McWilliams: on the endemic deflation, which has gripped Japan over the last 30 years. So what has happened in Japan is prices for everything have fallen every year a little, little bit. And prices in Dublin and Ireland have risen every year a little bit or quite a lot. So as a result of that, the relative prices between Japan and Ireland have flipped on their heads. So Ireland is now, for many things, more expensive than Japan, which used to be the most expensive country in the world. Yeah, yeah, and it was renowned for that. Maybe we need a bit of deflation here. We need a bit, okay, in the pub area. So Ireland has the second highest restaurant and hotel prices in the EU.

19:53The reason we have that is we have the second highest minimum wage. So when you have a high minimum wage and a lot of people working in hospitality are employed on the minimum wage, you will get high prices. But the point is,

20:05David McWilliams: it is all sucking the life out of the nighttime economy. Guinness have another index, not as good as my one, I can tell you that, but it's an interesting one. And it shows that it's basically how many pints would the Irish weekly wage buy. In 2026, the average weekly wage in this country of ours buys you 166 pints if that was your poison. In the mid-2020s, so 2021, 2022, it was actually higher because wages have risen. But the point is, alcohol is incredibly expensive. Now, the question is why? And the main reason is that the government has decided over years and years and years to slap, you know, this idea of the old favourites, John, in the budget.

20:52Yeah, yeah, yeah. And its excise duty is what it actually gets its money from. So the state via excise duty takes around 30 % to 35 % of the retail price of every drink sold in this country with a combination of VAT and excise duty. Excise duty being about 20%, VAT being about 13%. That generates 1.6 billion for the exchequer every year and alcohol and tobacco together make up about 40 % of all excise duties, right? As a result of this, what you get is you get a dramatic increase in the price to the punter, which is why the kids are going to supermarkets to get their beer and booze beforehand because pubs are just too expensive.

21:36Yeah. And actually, do you know what? The kind of unintended consequence of the high prices and the incessant piling on of excise duty on alcohol has led to an explosion of drug taking and cocaine in particular because it's so cheap compared to going for a pint. That's why when you walk into a bar, many bars, there's big queues at the Jacks. I know. Poor old John was complaining. John was dying to go for a slash the other night in a bar that will remain nameless. And he came out and he said to me, I can't believe it. Terrible queue, young fellas. They must have fierce weak blathers. And I said, I said, do you know what they're doing?

22:15I said, that is al fresco banger snorting, John. And you're absolutely right. And that's another unintended consequence. Again, it's actually, anyone who's studied economics will know about substitute goods, complementary goods. If you make goods expensive that can be substituted with goods that are cheap, those goods that are cheap will find that their demand goes up.

22:39David McWilliams: And as you said, the price of Coke relative to the rice of pint has fallen dramatically. so the kids are taking coke. Again, what you find... Less calories as well. Much less calories. I was noticing you were looking very svelte, John. But you see, the problem is Ozempic is the coke for our generation. That's the problem. That's true. That's true. Okay, so first of all, you've got the expense, which is phenomenal and largely government-driven. So VAT rates, which affect food and gastropubs and restaurants, have been changed. They're falling to 9 % by 13.5 % last year. But the problem is that the momentum of closures has resulted in an estimated 612 restaurants, cafes and gastropubs closing permanently in the last 12 months, right?

23:35David McWilliams: It's awful, yeah. Which is unbelievable, right? It's depressing. It's absolutely depressing. So all of that goes to undermine the product, the value product, which is going out at night, right? And of course, when places lose their bars, they don't just lose alcohol, they lose their soul. And I really feel that scenario. This is part of our culture. It will be akin to Italians losing pizzerias, right? That is part of the thing. And of course, then you think, okay, well, what else is going on? And the other else, John, is the crazy licensing laws we have in Ireland. I'm going to tell you a lovely story, right?

24:21David McWilliams: Ireland's licensing laws are a patchwork of about 100 different laws, some of which are over 200 years old, and two-thirds of which predate the foundation of this state and were introduced by more conservative Victorian and Edwardian administrations from the United Kingdom, which is amazing when you think of it. But we went one further. In 1935, Ireland introduced the Public Dancehall Act. John, did you know that? Actually, I did hear this. Go on, tell us. The Public Dancehall Act, right, was a crazy, crazy act. there was a moral panic in 1935 in Ireland, right? When the Catholic hierarchy and the Gaelic League ran an anti-jazz campaign, okay?

25:13David McWilliams: That's so good. Because the dance halls were playing jazz. And of course, you know what they made? The devil's music. This is what the Catholic hierarchy called jazz in the 1930s, right? They wouldn't be out of place for the AFD, John. They framed jazz as foreign music, and I quote, borrowed from the savages of the islands of the Pacific, right? They did not say that, did they? They did. And of course, the problem with that description is jazz has got nothing to do with the Pacific. Yes, of course. Yes, of course. But it doesn't matter. In their heads, they decided that the savages... All them foreigners are the same kind of attitude.

25:48All them foreigners are the same. They're corrupt, right? So, I jest you not. I jest you not, right? That's outrageous. They thought it would corrupt the Irish youth

25:56David McWilliams: and therefore de Valera passed the Public Dance Hall Act. Now, the Public Dance Hall Act, this is an amazing thing, right? It made it practically impossible to hold a dance without the sanction of the clergy, the guardie and the judiciary. And Eamon de Valera personally endorsed the campaign in a letter of support. Now, this is the great thing. Not only was it a moral campaign, it was a heist. The clergy then built parish halls. Do you know that all around Ireland, beside churches, is the parish hall? Yeah, yeah. You could have your dance in the parish hall. They gave the new dance hall licenses, which were effected by the Public Dance Hall Act, to the parish priest.

26:40David McWilliams: And the church and the state split a 25 % tax on every ticket sold. So it was the parish priest, the DJ as well. The parish priest, you could say, Okay, so nightlife was not only treated as a moral outrage in Ireland, but it was a revenue stream for the church, even when, you know the way we talk about Irish people being hypocritical, even when the church was discouraging because of the jazz, they were actually taking a cut on the sly, right? Jesus, Mac, make Ireland great again. Exactly. Nigga. Nigga. Exactly. But of course, that's kind of funny, but the real fact is that all these archaic anti-fun anti-capitalist laws in the licensing system mean that for example to open a new pub in ireland you must buy and extinguish an existing license how do you mean right so if you and i want to open a bar we have to buy a license that exists we'd have to extinguish that license and then apply for a new license and of course this This is created a second...

27:48Why?

27:48David McWilliams: Because the Irish state is a nanny state. It wants to involve itself in everything. And of course, what has this triggered, John? It means there's a secondary market in licenses. So licenses now sell for about 60 grand. Now think of what happens down the countryside. If you have a small bar and your clientele is falling and you know that there's a secondary market of 60 grand that you can get if you retire your license and then sell that license to somebody else, what do you do? You close down quicker because suddenly the government has turned the closing down of a bar into an asset of 60 grand to be sold in the secondary license.

28:36David McWilliams: So in a way, new license owners, younger people who want to open a bar, are hostage to both the government and to the older license holders who want to get out of the business, right? So it's crazy. So you accelerate the closing of businesses because you basically wave a carrot in front of the old publican from years ago who's a bit pissed off, who's in his 70s. And he says, well, I'll close down early. And basically he says to his son or his daughter or somebody who comes in, what's the point in keeping this over? Why don't we trouser the 60 grand and just close down? So what you can see, this is all your unintended consequences, right?

29:14David McWilliams: Yes. And of course, there's a thing called a special exemption order, which you need for any late opening. And these cost about 205 euros per night. Per night? And it has to be stamped by the Gardaí, right? And the parish priest surely as well. It's kind of crazy stuff, John. So for a normal nightclub, it's been estimated this adds about 20 grand in fees and legal fees just to stay open past midnight. And in addition to that, just finally, Ireland has the earliest closing time in nightclubs in Europe. Most clubs in Ireland have to finish by half two. Most clubs in Europe have to finish by half six in the morning.

29:58As a result of this, Irish nightclubs are kind of a part-time business. Clubs are kind of operated maybe six to nine hours per week across maybe two nights of the weekend. Why? Because it's so prohibitively expensive to keep a club open and it makes no sense at all other than a nanny state trying to control where people go out, how people go out and at what time. And make a couple of quid off it as well. And make a couple of quid off it, right? Yeah. And of course, getting a nightclub open late usually requires a court appearance. The poor old nightclub owner has to turn up in court and say to the guardee, can we please have this?

30:45And the guard has to say, well, there was no objection to this and yadda yadda yadda. So why would you bother? Why would you bother? It makes no sense at all. Yeah, but Mac, not only that, you know, apart from the fact that all these places are closing and there's nowhere to go, even if you did go out and put on your best duds, as I know you like to. Oh, well, of course, John. You go into town with your dancing shoes on. How do you get home? That's the other problem.

31:14David McWilliams: Well, isn't this the problem? Because one of the dilemmas here, John, we're going to talk about it after the break, is we talk about dereliction. We talk about the Halloween out of rural Ireland. We talk about the Halloween out of urban Ireland. Again, if you don't have a nighttime economy, you have empty streets. Empty streets are dangerous streets. Empty streets are scary streets. And of course, if you don't have a nighttime economy, one of the reasons you don't have a nighttime economy is there's no transport. And if you've no transport, well, then you go into this vortex. So let's talk about this after the break.

31:51David McWilliams: You might have noticed anybody who's been abroad this summer, loads of transport late at night in lots of cities, nothing in Ireland. Let's talk about that in a couple of minutes. Yep.

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33:58So Arnon's reputation, Mike, as a kind of a party town, a party place, lots of drink, lots of music, lots of crack, is under threat. Well, that's a complete joke. It just isn't any of those things. But it's under threat by ourselves. Yeah. Frustratingly, our own government loading on lots of excise duty and, you know, unnecessary regulation and all that kind of stuff. And then, as you mentioned before the break, a lack of transport.

34:30David McWilliams: Well, it's excise duty. It's crazy regulation. It's not allowing people to actually do what they want, when they want. The big idea is just get out of our own way. What we're actually doing in Ireland is we're in our own way. And the transport is a great example. So almost every small city in every country in Europe operates their own transport system. So they have buses in, you were in Gijon the other night in Spain, right? they will have their own buses, they'll have their own municipality, and they'll have their own either bus company, or they will contract out the lines to a private bus company.

35:08Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was great, yeah.

35:10David McWilliams: In Ireland, we don't have that. Galway City, take for example, and Galway County Council, with the NTA, the National Transport Agency, in December 2023, jointly published a redesigned bus network, including a new 24-hour Route 9 bus from Knocknockara into Parkmore, which as Galwegians who are listening to the show will know is a major route into the city. That was supposed to be opened in 2023. By March of this year, the timeline has slipped, the implementation is delayed and this is due to the NTA, the National Transport Agency, having to okay everything. So what you have something crazy is one small bus line in one small city has to be consistent with an overall transport strategy for the entire country.

36:07David McWilliams: And that has been held up by problems in Dublin, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And of course, what happens? There's no simple bus route in Galway to allow residents in and out of the city at decent times of the night. Then they all have to go to expensive taxis. And of course, that increases the expense of the night out. And we're back to square one. So what you find, John, is that at every single turn, the ability of Irish people to go out, the ability of Irish people to provide clubs, venues. I mean, you think about Dublin. Dublin is full of derelict buildings. Yeah. Any of these places could be a brilliant little underground club, a little rave, a little music venue.

37:00You know, even the sort of stuff we're doing in Kilconomics, John. You know, economics and comedy.

37:05David McWilliams: It doesn't have to be all booze related. It doesn't have to be all, you know, let's go and get off our heads. You could have comedy nights. You could have economics nights. You could have anything at all. People want to go out. people's work life balance has changed in the sense we're working much later much more differently the complexion of the society has changed with far more immigrants who have totally different social habits we have half the population is under the age of 40 we market ourselves as this fantastic the brilliant great crack society and what do we do we strangle the entire thing so that we have no nighttime economy.

37:47David McWilliams: So where do we go from here then, Mac? I have one suggestion, John. Go on. The bane of my life, coffee shops. You're more of a tea man, really, aren't you? Every time a pub is closed, a coffee shop opens up. Very strange situation, John. Booze is made in Ireland. Yeah. Booze employs people in Ireland. Why do we have excise duties on booze that is crippling the industry and crippling the hospitality industry, which just let me give you a sense of how big it is, right? The hospitality industry is estimated to be worth about$4 billion a year to the country. The drinks, pubs, off-license hotels, producers currently support around 92 ,000 jobs.

38:33David McWilliams: The wider hospitality sector is estimated that hotels and restaurants, bars, catering, employs about 207 ,000 people, About 5 % or 6 % of the workforce. So what we're talking about is a significant domestic industry. Coffee, on the other hand, as far as I know, has never, ever been grown in Ireland. Right? Not so far. Climate change may change that. I don't know of a coffee plantation in Offaly, right? I've never heard of deep roasted Ruscommon beans, right? and the aromatic scents of barn yards and all that sort of stuff. So we have this crazy situation where we tax the stuff that's made here, which is the soul of the nation's marketing offering.

39:29David McWilliams: And as I said about, let's say, my granny's pub, was actually an absolutely essential epicenter of the ecosystem that was rural Ireland, right? We tax that stuff out of existence. Coffee, which is made anywhere but Ireland, we don't tax it. And as a result of this, it is far cheaper to produce and serve coffee than it is to serve booze. So wouldn't it be a very, very interesting idea? rather than tax booze, which we make. Tax coffee, which somebody else makes. And then so do and change the relative prices, give the bars and the clubs a break and put the bill onto rather faceless, dull, quiet, be laptop to places where you go in and everyone's on their headphones, on their laptop, looking at Instagram, drinking mochas and skinny lattes and all that carry on.

40:38And I say, bring back the pint, John.

40:40David McWilliams: That's what I say. End of story. The pint of playing is your only man. Your only man. We'll talk to you Thursday.

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